Feb. 2—CHEYENNE — In March, Tallgrass Energy, L.P. applied to inject carbon dioxide deep into geological formations in southeastern Laramie County. In December, the company submitted five more applications for a Class VI well.

Although this technology has been around since the 1970s in the United States, Class VI wells are relatively new and are just now rolling out across the country. Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) approved the state’s first three Class VI permits in December for similar projects near Granger, west of Green River.

Class VI wells are different from the more common Class II wells because more pressure is put into the ground, as they’re not pumping anything out like oil or water. Class II wells inject fluids associated with oil and natural gas production, while Class VI wells are for permanent carbon dioxide storage.

There are currently around 180,000 Class II wells across the country and 15 operating carbon capture and storage facilities, with the capacity to capture 0.4% of the nation’s total annual CO2 emissions.

Since the Class VI program began in 2010, 12 permits have been approved nationwide, and only two have led to construction and operation.

The project in Laramie County, estimated to cost between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, will convert natural gas pipelines to pump carbon emissions from sources across the region and store up to 10.6 million metric tons of CO2 underground every year. Tallgrass said they hope this project will have at least 30 years of storage, totaling around 318 million metric tons of CO2.

If realized, it will result in more than 626 jobs during the construction phase and approximately 47 jobs during ongoing operations. Tallgrass estimates the construction efforts will result in $32.9 million in wages and $42.1 million in tax revenue during the two-year construction period, and operations will result in an additional $3.5 million in wages and $8.4 million in tax revenue during the period of operations.

Many experts hail CCUS as one of the solutions of achieving the U.S. goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050. The federal government committed more than $8 billion in funds available to carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) projects between 2022 and 2026.

However, other experts criticize the practice as a false hope.

“They overpromise and underdeliver, they run over budget, they cost more than proponents expect, they run less frequently than project sponsors expect because of various technical challenges, and they ultimately capture less than project proponents claim that they will,” said Steven Feit, senior attorney and the legal and research manager for U.S. fossil economy team at the Center for International Environmental Law.

Energy efficiency

“It is pitched as this kind of great solution for fossil fuels. Essentially, it promises the energy from fossil fuels without the emissions from fossil fuels,” Feit continued.

He said it requires more energy to run the carbon capture equipment for most applications, offsetting any benefit from sequestering carbon.

“It means more upstream fossil fuel production, which means more coal mining or fracking or drilling and the concomitant emissions that come from that,” he said. “So not only does it not deal with upstream emissions, it increases them.”

A study by Emily Grubert, former deputy assistant secretary of carbon management at the U.S. Department of Energy, supports Feit’s claims. It suggests that fossil power retrofits to capture carbon supported by federal tax credits, which incentivize CCUS projects, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 24% at best and increase by 82% at worst.

Tallgrass said that the study does not accurately represent its project, however. Company officials said some of the assumptions don’t reflect the full effect of emissions reductions moving forward.

Tallgrass said the modeling in the study doesn’t focus on outcomes from the use of responsibly sourced natural gas and from the ongoing work of policymakers and the broader energy industry to reduce CO2 emissions significantly in the upstream supply chain.

“No one, including ourselves, would pursue carbon capture and storage projects if they thought there was even an inkling that it would contribute more to the issue,” said Tallgrass Energy Segment President Kyle Quackenbush.

He said that their customers have incentives to reduce emissions and report those numbers to the government through models and calculations, which demonstrate a reduction in emissions.

“I can just tell you that for our specific project, definitively, it is a massive decrease in emissions,” Quackenbush said. He also said that utilizing CCUS is necessary when renewable energy sources cannot meet the demand.

“We are across the Midwest, where you have very large-scale wind and solar resources. We are being approached by utilities along the entire pipeline who have to use, today, a natural gas fired power plant because the wind and solar is not providing electricity when they need it.

“We’re the avenue to make it so that you could decarbonize the other portion of the day, and so that you would have decarbonized power throughout the day,” Quackenbush said. “I recognize that these are nuanced, but I think we feel very confident that we are decreasing, meaningfully, those CO2 emissions.”

Pipelines

In 2020, a CO2 pipeline burst in Sataria, Mississippi. More than 300 community members evacuated, and at least 45 people were hospitalized. Residents showed symptoms of CO2 poisoning and oxygen deprivation from the more than 31,000 barrels of CO2 released into the atmosphere from the leak.

“When [CO2] releases from a pipeline, it expands really rapidly. It basically super cools and kills the immediate area,” Feit said. “But then, because CO2 is heavier than air, it hugs the ground. So, what you have is a release of a massive plume of gas that, when it comes into contact with animals, including humans, it can asphyxiate and kill them or make them sick, cause all sorts of permanent damage.”

The gas may also spread wider in flat areas. It is also colorless, odorless and tasteless and only be detected with a CO2 gas detector.

Tallgrass operates more than 7,000 miles of pipeline across the country that transport natural gas or crude oil. For the project in Laramie County, the company intends to convert a natural gas pipeline into a CO2 pipeline. One of its customers who intends to sequester its emissions in this project is an ethanol plant in eastern Nebraska. The pipeline will transport CO2 about 400 miles from Columbus, Nebraska, across the state to Laramie County.

Quackenbush said that converting the Trailblazer pipeline, which supports this CCUS project and runs from Colorado, south of Cheyenne, to Beatrice, Nebraska, will be safe and is not technically complex.

“The pipeline itself is rated for a pressure, and as long as we’re operating underneath that pressure, then we can move CO2,” he said.

There are some concerns with what happens if there is water in the pipeline. When water and CO2 mix, it forms carbonic acid, which can corrode the pipeline.

Tallgrass is addressing this issue through dehydration at delivery points in the system and will put measurements in place to alert the company if there is water in the pipeline so that they will stop receiving CO2 from that customer.

Giving fossil fuel a lifeline

Feit calls CCUS a dangerous distraction.

“This is not just pollution abatement technology,” Feit said, “and not just some kind of transitional technology that folks are proposing we put on while we wait for renewables to just, you know, sweep fossil fuels out of the system and electrification to sweep ethanol and internal combustion engines out of the system.

“What this is, is an effort to build an entirely new infrastructure and industrial system, in many ways layered on top of the existing industrial system to both literally and figuratively and legally and economically cement it in place so that it is harder to dislodge, in order to undertake the energy transition that is necessary to properly combat the climate crisis.”

Between 2011 and 2023, federal appropriations for carbon capture and storage research related programs totaled $5.3 billion. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provides $8.2 billion in advance appropriations for the same programs between 2022 and 2026.

Companies that capture and store CO2 are also eligible for the section 45Q federal tax credit, which gives them an incentive to use capture and store emissions. This reduced federal revenues by $1 billion between 2010 and 2019. The tax credit was expanded significantly in 2022, and staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation project it will reduce federal revenue by $5 billion between 2023 and 2027.

Feit said he believes this goes against the model of internalized costs under the polluter pays principle, where firms are incentivized to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

“They’re incentivized to fire more gas or burn more coal to sell those emissions to the government for subsidies,” he said.

Critics of the technology say that money would be better invested in renewable energy, and it gives the fossil fuel industry a lifeline.

A 2020 state law requires that Wyoming utilities looking to close coal-fired power plants first try to retrofit the facilities with carbon capture technology.

The Tallgrass project received funds from the federal government and the state of Wyoming and will also fund it with loans and its own capital.

Quackenbush said reducing emissions is not an either/or situation, where renewable energy needs to be picked over fossil fuels, but rather requires multiple approaches and a realistic perspective.

“We work with a lot of utility customers, as an example, trying to do everything they can to decarbonize, and they have to do everything possible in order to accomplish their goals,” Quackenbush said. “Renewables isn’t sufficient for them in the timelines when they need to be able to perform on their decarbonization. And so, this is the difference between them being able to achieve decarbonization on a timeline or not. But it’s not because they’re choosing this instead of, they’re choosing it in addition to.

“This is the avenue to decarbonize an industry in the United States, potentially, that doesn’t have an option to electrify, as an example.”

Next steps

Tallgrass submitted its first application for an injection site to sequester CO2 in southeastern Laramie County in March of last year. It typically takes between 180 and 360 days for the DEQ to review the application and approve or deny. The company submitted five more in December.

If approved, the company will construct the injection site and submit another application to begin injection. It takes a similar amount of time for the DEQ to pass judgment on that application, as well. Then, Tallgrass will be able to begin the sequestration process.

Noah Zahn is the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s local government/business reporter. He can be reached at 307-633-3128 or nzahn@wyomingnews.com. Follow him on X @NoahZahnn.